On The Move

I always found pleasure in pursuing my writing activities in a variety of locations. My trusty pad and pen accompanied me to the library, the park, the coffee shop -and always allowed me to capture snippets of conversations or funky setting descriptions to incorporate into whatever project I was working on. I also found that something I had written in the more confined space of my office would somehow look different in another place. My best editing took place anywhere else.

Fast forward to today and I am blessed to have a laptop to help me with my work. Since so many projects are web site copy or newsletter editing, it makes more sense to tackle them on a computer. Working on several pages of text at a time really lends itself to the memory and screen of a laptop. Even without a 'hot spot' to connect me, I had copied clips from various websites into OneNote which enabled me to get some ideas from the Internet even when I wasn't connected. All this while sitting in a waiting room for several hours.

Even now I have moved to a different room to give me a fresh perspective while I try to keep my commitment of writing a weekly blog. The overstuffed couch is comfortable and with my feet up on the coffee table I am very relaxed. And that is always helpful when trying to be creative.

Time Management

I'm not exactly the 'word' in managing time, but I have been giving it more serious consideration lately with an increasingly busy schedule. I find that I come up with terrific plans and the best of intentions, then splat! things come crashing down.

Well, I think that to be successful in any business you need to be able to keep busy and fresh. This means managing your time to seek out new opportunities and ways of doing the same thing in a different way. So here I am revisiting my long-ignored blog hoping that I can share with readers bits that I've learned about the writing life. Well, today's nugget is to manage your time.

So the plan is this: Monday will be the day for the weekly blog post. There will be a chunk of time every afternoon dedicated to marketing. Early morning hours will be my 'quiet time' opportunity to edit my novel or work on my new book. Other than that, I find that my time is largely flexible based on the urgency of the various projects on my plate and their deadlines. And, for heaven's sake, stop checking email ten times a day! Most of my projects require frequent email communication, but I plan to streamline that a little so that specific times will be email 'check & response' times.

Well, that's my plan. You'll know if it's working for me if I actually remember to make a blog post next Monday. Enjoy your writing week!